Question: What Texas businessman was known as the “father of voicemail”?
Answer: Gordon Matthews. Born in Tulsa in 1936, he joined Texas Instruments in 1966 after serving in the U.S. Marine Corps. His inspiration for voicemail came in 1970, when he visited a client’s office and noticed trash bins filled with notes of messages from missed calls. The prototype voicemail system he developed required 64 telephone lines, 114 Intel 8086 microprocessors, and four refrigerator-sized 200-megabyte hard drives.
In 1979, Matthews founded a company in Dallas to manufacture the system, which he patented as “Voice Message Exchange.” The following year, 3M became the first company to implement voicemail. Matthews sold VMX Inc. in 1989 and retired to Austin, where he lived until his death in 2002.
